[Sca-cooks] "An Arab Mead" !!!

[Susan Fox-Davis]

I could not agree more.  From his home page, it seems that the author is
a brewer of mead and wine, so to his eye everything with honey in it must
be mead.  Like the rest of the august sodality of this list, my read of
the recipe shows no evidence of fermentation.  Jalab surely, mead no.  I
believe his sentence should be to read the recipe until it makes sense,
and under no circumstances be permitted to watch the feature film "The
Thirteenth Warrior" ever again.  Mead indeed.

My only proofreading nitpick is that you left the R out of the last
appearance of the word "grape" in the last paragraph.

Yours in Service,
Selene in Caid



david friedman wrote:

> The latest T.I. has an article describing a recipe from an Arabic
> medicinal formulary which the author thinks is a mead or, more
> precisely, pyment. I have sent off the following letter to T.I..
> Comments?
> -----
> The article "An Arab Mead" in T.I. 140 describes its recipe as
> "clearly a variety of mead (or, more properly, a sort of sack
> pyment)." I would have said that, on the evidence provided, it is
> clearly nothing of the sort. Consider:
>
> 1. The recipe specifies boiling the liquid until it is reduced by
> half. That is a very long boil, and one could not reasonably expect
> any yeast in the original grape pulp to survive it. Nothing is said
> about adding any additional source of yeast after the liquid has
> cooled.
>
> 2. The liquid contains grape juice at about twice its natural
> concentration, plus about three pounds  of honey per gallon. The
> combination comes to roughly three times the sugar concentration
> normally used to make wine or mead.
>
> 3. The recipe says to put the liquid into flasks and stopper them.
> There is no intermediate fermentation and nothing is said about
> leaving the stoppers loose. Failing to do so, as the author of the
> article points out, leads to problems.
>
> Each of those points by itself is evidence that what is being
> described is not a fermented drink. Combining them and  adding the
> religious prohibition against drinking fermented gape juice makes the
> article's interpretation highly implausible.
> ---
> Those of you who have not received you T.I. yet will find the article
> webbed by the author at:
>
> http://web.raex.com/~obsidian/arabmead.html
> --
> David/Cariadoc
> http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
> _______________________________________________
> Sca-cooks mailing list
> Sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
> http://www.ansteorra.org/mailman/listinfo/sca-cooks